If you’re primarily a PC gamer, there’s a good chance you do the majority of your day-to-day gaming on Steam. However, while Steam is arguably the most popular PC gaming platform, it’s not the only one. Competing platforms like Epic Games Store and publisher-specific platforms like Origin, Ubisoft Connect, and Battle.net are all vying for space on PC. If you buy games on all these platforms and play them regularly, keeping track of them all can be a real headache, not to mention all the DRM-free rogue games that get picked up here and there. there is.
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If you’re tired of manually adding and removing games from other platforms to your Steam library to keep everything in order, it might be time to try a little organizational overhaul. For this purpose, there are several major apps available that allow you to organize your entire digital game collection in a hurry. Playnite, One Game Launcher, and GOG Galaxy 2.0 library organization apps help future-proof your overall gaming experience along with your regular gaming experience. Hardware updates. These apps serve a similar purpose of getting all your games from multiple platforms in one place, but they do it in slightly different ways that can affect your overall experience.
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Playnite’s open source design can be broadly applied with a little tweaking
If you’re a PC gamer, you’re probably used to tinkering with your games from time to time to get them to work the way you want. If you don’t mind a little extra work under the hood, you can take advantage of Playnite, a completely open source video game library manager designed to integrate as many disparate libraries and services as possible as conveniently as possible. You might get more out of it.
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Playnite doesn’t require you to manage your own logins and doesn’t store user data anywhere other than its own local storage. By combining user-created plugins and existing credentials, you can unlock game libraries on major services like Steam and Epic Games Store, as well as smaller storefronts and services like Fanatical, itch.io, and Meta Quest. can be synced.
What’s especially cool is that thanks to the metadata plugin, every game you add to your library includes a wide range of Steam-like information, including genre, developer information, and cover art. Thanks to the link to IGDB, the missing cover art will be automatically added to the recognized games. Steam usually requires you to do this manually. It takes a bit of work to get Playnite to work the way you want, but once everything is configured, all libraries are consistent and the footprint on the processor is fairly small.
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One Game Launcher is a simple widget for Windows devices
If you’re an avid Windows fan and want to keep your app usage localized to the Microsoft Store as much as possible, don’t worry. The Microsoft Store has a library organization app called One Game Launcher that’s designed to integrate your digital games across multiple platforms and display them all as one seamless widget.
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One game launcher can be run from the regular Windows Start menu or launched as a widget on the Windows Game Bar, allowing you to quickly bring up games in either situation. You can integrate libraries from several major platforms, including Steam, Epic Games Store, GOG, Battle.net, and of course Microsoft Store and Game Pass. What’s great is that games added to One Game Launcher can be streamed to connected devices like your TV and managed with a controller. Instead of having to get up and use a mouse and keyboard every time, you can play PC games just like you would on a console from the comfort of your couch.
GOG Galaxy 2.0 takes the guesswork out of multiplatform management
In case you didn’t recognize the name, GOG Galaxy 2.0 is a product of GOG, a DRM-free game distribution service owned by CD Projekt Group. The main attraction of buying games on GOG is that you get a direct installer that doesn’t require DRM, but the standalone installer means there’s no digital library outside of the GOG website where you can easily store and search everything. I will. GOG Galaxy 2.0 was created to address this issue and incorporate most other major platforms into the process.
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Once you install GOG Galaxy 2.0 and log in with your GOG account, all games purchased through GOG will be automatically added to your library. But in addition to that, you can also log in using login credentials from other platforms and retrieve libraries from the respective platforms, and the app can also mark games that are currently installed on your drive. . GOG Galaxy 2.0 natively supports GOG, Epic Games Store, Xbox Live, and lets you import libraries from Steam, Origin, Battle.net, and more through community integrations.
The only catch is that these plugins are made by the community, so some libraries aren’t fully integrated and may be missing features like in-app installations, achievements, friends lists, etc. That’s it. Additionally, there have been some complaints from users recently that the available plugins have not been updated and are starting to work. But overall, GOG Galaxy 2.0 is a good library organizer if you primarily use major storefronts and platforms and want your app to handle most of the library import process for you.
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